That was like 14 years ago and back in the day when 3dfx still existed, Nvidia and ATI just started to be major contender, 800x600 was considered high resolution, and the pentium 2 reigned supreme. The pentium 2 400MhZ was like 800+ dollars, and 96 MB of ram was considered excessive.

Boy... things have changed so much in just 14 years, plus I feel old haha...

I worked on cleaning off the hardware shelves last week and ran across my old Warcraft for DOS CD .. now that is going back in time a bit. Unlike the n00bs who played games from within Windows, I stayed hardcore with my QEMM memory manager in place, trying to eke out that extra 7k of conventional memory to get my mouse to work in-game. Ahh those were the days ...

Oh yeah... I remember doing that. I used to make boot discs for each game that I played to optimize the driver set and get as much conventional memory available as I can. Playing games on PC's were just so complicated compared to today. Some games just needed an obscene amount of conventional memory to run properly.

I still remember when my Apple computer could barely run Wolfenstein 3D. The chaingun would just make clanking noises and sadly I couldn't play Doom on it . I also remember my brother gave me a Compaq desktop that his company was going to throw away a year after getting it. It had been stripped of most parts except the motherboard, Pentium II 333mhz, 32 mb of ram which I upgraded to 128 or 256 I can't remember, and no hard drive so he gave me a 1.2gb drive to start me out with. I eventually bought an 8gb drive used online and a sound card so I could actually hear things. I think I had to scavenge for a modem as well to connect up to AOL! That was a great machine! Sadly after that machine I kept purchasing those all in one boxes at Walmart where it came with the desktop, monitor, and a cheap printer. Had I actually saved up my money my upgrade times would have been extended. I mean the things would ship with 128mb of ram on Windows XP plus factor in the shared memory required for video which was just aweful! Needless to say I upgraded to 512mbs! I stumbled upon all of the spec booklets I kept from those machines...what a good laugh that was! I actually stumbled upon a Sears and JCPenny's Christmas magazine a month ago from I think either 1989 or 1990 and saw the fantastic prices for an average computer back then.

I still have SO many games from the 90's. I just can't throw them away.

DOS Mechwarrior 2 and Windows 95 MW2: MercenariesKingdom o' Magic on DOS (still the funniest game I've ever played)DOOMmany more I'd have to dig out to name.

There was just something special about gaming back then that always made me want to keep the boxes and CD's forever.

"No I don't want the Ask toolbar! No I don't want Bing as my default search! No I don't want to make Chrome my default browser!""Good grief, man! WHAT are you trying to install on that poor computer?""Antivirus."

Oh yeah... I remember doing that. I used to make boot discs for each game that I played to optimize the driver set and get as much conventional memory available as I can. Playing games on PC's were just so complicated compared to today. Some games just needed an obscene amount of conventional memory to run properly.

As a man who successfully* got Falcon 3.0 to play on a 286-12 with 1MB of RAM I remember the conventional memory battle all too well.

* Successfully = The game started up and ran but was worse than a slideshow. Probably less than .5 FPS.

Last edited by adampk17 on Wed Jan 02, 2013 4:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I do. I used to have some old benchmark programs from back in the early DX9 days that I would run when I got a new video card. It made for interesting study to realize where the companies were spending their time. I recall noticing that it seemed the 2D performance was dropping over the years. Unfortunately I lost the programs and all of my stored data during a hard drive crash.

I recall noticing that it seemed the 2D performance was dropping over the years.

Your recollection is almost certainly correct. Between GDI+ and the WDDM a lot of those tasks were no longer hardware accelerated, but even before that it became less and less of a priority for driver writers.

I vaguely remember when my dad bought a 286-12MHz with 256-color VGA graphics, DOS 4.0, and a dot-matrix Epson printer. That was an all-day shopping trip, like buying a refrigerator. At the time I was still using my allowance to buy newspapers and read them in the car, and my dad ended up refunding my quarter because I turned up a Computer City coupon that saved something like $100 on the printer when purchased with a computer system.

We ran that thing for years, and it never did have a soundcard. My dad set up a batch-file menu system so we could access the basic programs, like Microsoft Works and Funnels & Buckets. Somewhere along the line, my mom developed a bit of a Tetris addiction. I got sufficiently frustrated about not knowing how to make the computer work that I finally sat down with the DOS 4.0 manual and walked right through it, command by command. And lo, for it was destiny...

I think I discovered Tom's Hardware, back when it was more like what TR is today, shortly after its inception in 1996. Around the same time, ComputorEdge was still publishing hardcopy and had just opened a sub-office in the Denver area, so that was my other source of "hot and new" information. Even got a couple letters published, I think.

I vaguely recall ComputerEdge. I was more a fan of Computer Shopper, the 600-page bible that came out every month. It also had "The Hard Edge with Alice and Bill".

My dad got a Zenith 286 as well. I forget the MHz but he got 2.5 MB of RAM and a 287 eventually. EGA, no fancy 256 color stuff for us. GameBlaster (AM-synth precursor to the FM-synth SoundBlaster) for sound to start and I think we got 2 x 10 MB or 2 x 20 MB hard drives eventually. And from somewhere an Epson MX-80 dot matrix that was highly reliable. Probably would still be going if used--we sold the system to some guys who wanted to use it as a cheap CAD system for college. Suckers. I think DOS was 3.x and we moved to 5.x before giving it up.

My dad let me do most of the computer junk after a while. He had to use 'em for work so didn't want to mess with them much at home. I ended up setting a multiboot environment though I think it was mainly on the 486DX/33 system for playing different games (EMS, XMS, none for max conventional) and mod demos. It's funny, too, that my mom recently got into Tetris in the last few years.

I'm like a mini Starfalcon with hardware and software. A packrat! I just need to get it all set up sometime for a mini museum or somethin'.

I vaguely recall ComputerEdge. I was more a fan of Computer Shopper, the 600-page bible that came out every month. It also had "The Hard Edge with Alice and Bill".

In the 'Pepsi lab of DOOOOOOOM' !!!! Alice wrote a great article on the anniversary of Quake launching IIRC, so I emailed her back and received a great reply. They remain my favorite read for a (somewhat) younger impressionable gamer mind. I even mentioned the old Computer Shopper's width and girth and back damaging weight to a co-worker today. My mailman was happy when I stopped getting that sub I am sure.

Edit: Anyone get 'Crusader: No Remorse' working in Windows yet ???? There is your challenge for the year.

My first computer game (at least, the first one I didn't type in BASIC out of a book) came on a standard audio cassette, which I used in a cassette player that was attached via the MICROPHONE jack to my TRS-80 Color Computer. Yeah, the word Color was part of the name because, at that time, color was actually considered a selling point. A deluxe feature. Anyway, you typed a command (there was no GUI) and pressed "play" and if you timed it right, the program loaded. Well, most of the time. The game was one of those old text adventures; I don't recall exactly which one.

After that, I upgraded to the far more powerful Apple IIgs which featured an absolutely amazing (at the time) one full megabyte of RAM. The entire OS fit on a floppy disk. If you wanted to play a game, you shut off the computer and booted the game from it's own floppy disk. If the game was actually good, you probably switched between several other floppy disks. Most games ran at 230x200 but the really good ones ran at 640x200. And you could show 4,096 colors... but only 800 at once...

Well my first system was really a Heathkit H89 Zilog Z80-based system. 1 5.25" hard-sector floppy drive and an expansion that added 2 more. CP/M. The video was monochrome, maybe 9"? I recall my dad overclocked the CPU but not sure to what.

Am I the only person that misses the old, fun DRM? DRM that involved you breaking codes with the provided booklet, filling in blanks to phrases in the manual, referencing game compendiums or just looking at the tables and answering what was in certain cells. Nothing said "please don't steal" like "please don't steal" written on the floppy or a half hearted DRM attempt. Don't treat us like a criminal, regardless of whether we purchase it or not.

Am I the only person that misses the old, fun DRM? DRM that involved you breaking codes with the provided booklet, filling in blanks to phrases in the manual, referencing game compendiums or just looking at the tables and answering what was in certain cells. Nothing said "please don't steal" like "please don't steal" written on the floppy or a half hearted DRM attempt. Don't treat us like a criminal, regardless of whether we purchase it or not.

Played 688 Attack Sub a metric crapload back in the day. Needed the manual to start the game as it asked for a certain word in a certain position on a certain page.

Never ask a woman who is eating ice cream straight from the carton how she's doing.

Packard Bell 486 SX 33MHz w/4MB RAM and a 250MB HDD and......a CD-ROM! I remember playing Return to Zork for hours on that machine. Felt twice as fast when we upgraded the RAM from 4 to 8 MB for $250. Stopped turning on because the rod that ran from the front button to the PSU in the back of the machine crunched.

Came with a broadband 2800 baud modem that only took several minutes to load AOL "artwork" screens. Upgraded to a 28.8 screamer one xmas, that was awesome. Back when you could really feel an upgrade.....

I used to like the children's books that would (for some reason) come with some BASIC code (I think it was BASIC). They'd have you input it into a system like a Commodore 64 and it'd make the screen flash or something.

I used to like the children's books that would (for some reason) come with some BASIC code (I think it was BASIC). They'd have you input it into a system like a Commodore 64 and it'd make the screen flash or something.

For kicks, Scott should do a review of old hardware and attempt to run modern applications for fun. Run XP on say a PII and try to do compression, run Office 2013, panorama factory, etc. And obviously omit programs that need extensions and such.

I do. I used to have some old benchmark programs from back in the early DX9 days that I would run when I got a new video card. It made for interesting study to realize where the companies were spending their time. I recall noticing that it seemed the 2D performance was dropping over the years. Unfortunately I lost the programs and all of my stored data during a hard drive crash.

Still might see if I can find some of those programs again one day.

I still run an oooollld benchmark called 'Final Reality' everytime I upgrade, it's good for amusements sake. I think it might have been made my Futuremark or whatever the 3DMark creators are calling themselves these days. Every single GPU upgrade since the Voodoo 3 3000 my score on it has gotten progressively worse.

It's entertaining to look back and read older new/review bits sometimes. I tend to keep a most of my old hardware around just for memories sake.I have an old 200 something MB HDD that still works too.

Fun stuff. Once upon a time 120MHz Pentium seemed unbelievably powerful.I do miss the Celery 300 @450. Buy low end get performance that matches or exceeds the most expensive processor around in minutes.